Winner Takes All
by NeiLegni
Summary: New York was supposed to be a place where things happen. She always dreamed it would be, but maybe she should have dreamed a little more specifically. In New York, things have happened…just not to her. Angsty vignette. Faberry if you squint.


The first time she sees her is at an audition. It's just a brief glimpse—really, it could have been anyone. Rachel closes the door and lets her show-face fall (she just knows she was flat for most of the last verse) and starts down the narrow hallway when another girl—a blonde, of course she's blonde, they're always blonde— bumps into her and her music flutters to the floor.

"Jesus, watch where you're going!" she snaps and the girl's head whips around.

"I'm not the one who needs to watch where I'm going."

The steel behind the icy voice jogs her memory and it all rushes back in an instant: the slushies, the pornographic pictures, the nicknames—everything about Lima she's packed away and shoved to the back of her mind.

Their eyes meet in recognition for the briefest of seconds before the blonde, no, not the blonde, Quinn Fabray turns on her heel and saunters to the same door that bears a sheet of paper announcing auditions for The Hunger Games: A New Musical.

The way she sees it she has three choices. She could wish her luck, insult her, or run.

She runs.

—-

Rachel waits by the phone for three days before resigning herself to the fact that she will not be getting a callback for the role of Katniss Everdeen, but she comforts herself in the thought that if she didn't get called back, there's no way on earth Quinn stood a chance.

—

She sees her again almost a year later when her face is splashed across the front of the Arts and Entertainment section of the New York Times. She is too hung over after a night of shots and pool at the bar across the street for this shit.

"Broadway Newcomer Quinn Fabray starring as Katniss Everdeen in Stephen Schwartz's Newest Project The Hunger Games: A New Musical". She almost chokes on her coffee and wishes that there was someone she could tell. Unfortunately she and Kurt fell out of touch two years after arriving in New York and the closest thing she had to a boyfriend is a girl named Kassidi who occasionally gets her off after accompanying her on piano at open mic nights.

"Quinn Fabray is a Broadway starlet," she tells her cat, Liza before promptly throwing up in the kitchen sink.

—

She's waiting tables at the West Bank Cafe the night the show opens. The buzz around it has been good and Rachel had almost considered blowing her week's tips on a ticket, but she just can't stomach it. Every party she waits tells her they're off to see the show next door and she acts enthused every time they mention the remarkably pretty girl from all the interviews.

"Yes," she agrees, "I have heard she's very good. She is very, very lucky. You're right, she is extremely talented."

"It's incredible. You've got this girl from No Where USA who was bullied and who struggled and beat the odds and her talent is really carrying her through. I mean, it takes a certain brand of person to really make their dreams come true in a city like this," one of her customers tells her. "You've got to be driven and determined. You've got to want it more than anyone and that girl made it happen. A thousand girls come to New York to wait tables and try to claw their way to the top and you know what? They all fail. This girl, this Quinn Fabray, she's got what it takes to just do it."

When no one's looking, Rachel spits in his martini.

—

Maybe it's curiosity, maybe it's a lingering love for the arts, maybe it's a secret desire to expose to the hopeful crowd that the Quinn Fabray they're already praising as a Tony hopeful is only pursuing this Broadway dream to steal from Rachel everything that's ever meant anything.

Maybe she just wants to see if Quinn looks as beautiful in person as she did in that picture she saw in Variety.

She can't bring herself to see the show, but she waits at the stage door after her shift ends and waits for Quinn to make her grand exit.

Eventually people begin to filter in around her and they're eagerly awaiting the chance to see the same girl who Rachel swore would never cross her mind again.

It's not right. It should be her swinging open that heavy door and meeting Quinn Fabray's eyes as she eats her heart out and rues the day she ever decided to make Rachel's life such hell. Instead Rachel is in a wrinkled white button down with cheap black slacks and a purse full of waitressing tips, a worn issue of Back Stage, and a Starbucks name tag waiting to watch her high school rival rob her of the rest of her worth.

The crowd around her applauds and whistles when Quinn makes her way through them and Rachel almost allows herself to imagine the applause is for her. Quinn is grinning like an idiot and her teeth are blindingly white and Rachel can't stop herself before a strangled "Quinn!" escapes her.

Quinn whips around and Rachel is sure she recognized her voice. The list of insults she had thought up while she waited escapes her and she can only stare dumbly. Quinn holds her gaze and looks at her with something like pity and guilt in one.

Rachel thinks she might come over and say something. Maybe apologize or slip her her phone number, or the number of an agent or something. But she doesn't. She shakes her head and turns her attention to a little girl who has the same giddy and delirious gleam her eyes that Rachel remembers from her first Broadway show. From the moment she met her idol.

She'll never be anyone's idol.

A cab pulls up to the curb and Quinn climbs in, but not before giving Rachel one last look and giving her the slightest of waves. Hello? Goodbye? Fuck you? Rachel doesn't know. She drops her gaze to her scuffed shoes and doesn't look up until she hears the cab pull away.


End file.
